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Game #8-606: Wofford Terriers at North Carolina-Greensboro Spartans February 21, 2012 7:00 pm Greensboro Coliseum BBState Stats/Recap

This is it, the final week of regular season games. I can't believe how fast the season has zoomed by. While some of you will have next week to close out the regular season, I usually have been going to Big South, SoCon, and some CAA games. All of those conferences close out this Saturday with conference tournaments starting next week.

I wanted to end the regular season with a bang and go to 5 games in 6 days, but work intervened on Monday night, so I wasn't able to go to Orangeburg and meetup with Ian McCormick at the South Carolina St game.
The rest of the week was all set though with trips to Greensboro, Wilmington, Charleston and Elon forthcoming.

In the beginning of the season I never envisioned going to this many games. When I requested to join the 800GP I told Kyle I would be able to cover all the Coastal Carolina home games and hopefully get down to Charleston for a game or two. When the season started, that's exactly what I did since CCU had 4 home games in the opening week and I also took a trip down to Charleston for the Charleston Classic.

I liked the trip to Charleston so I went up to Wilmington a few days after. This was pretty fun going to different places, so I planned a weekend trip in North Carolina to see three games. I squeezed in more games in the Big South and SoCon and started to look up games for when I planned trips up north to visit friends and family. It was a snowball effect and became very addictive; three hour rides in the car have become nothing to me when before I used to complain about driving for an hour.

On a trip last week to Greensboro I called my mom, which I will do sometimes to pass the time on the drive. She mentioned my dad had been keeping up with all my recaps and noticed I was pretty high on the leaderboards. I asked her if she was really surprised since when I have my mind set on something I won't half ass it. She agreed and mentioned I probably got that trait from her since we are both pretty meticulous with whatever we do.

I figured at some point in the season I would get burned out or become bored with going to so many games. While I've seen a few poor games, there's always a silver lining to each matchup. Just getting out and going to new towns and cities has been a fresh change since I hadn't been on a vacation in about three years leading up to this season. Driving six total hours on a work day, watching a game, sleeping and going back to work may not seem like a vacation to most, but it has been enjoyable to me. Don't get me wrong, I love living in Myrtle Beach, but in the winter this place can be a ghost town, so the constant travel has been welcomed with open arms.

Tuesday night for example was a perfect night to go see a game somewhere. There's not much going on during a Tuesday in Myrtle in mid-February, so I headed to Greensboro to see UNCG have their senior night against Wofford. The Terriers didn't fare so well against Charleston Southern on their Senior Night, but that was much more emotional with team leader Kelvin Martin being honored. This was also a conference game and much more important both in jockeying for seeding in the SoCon tournament.

The first half was played pretty evenly throughout. UNCG did have a few mini spurts in which it looked like they may be on one of their big runs they are accustomed to, but the defense wasn't there on the interior
allowing several easy looks for Wofford.

The Spartans were without leading scorer Trevis Simpson again who missed the previous home game with a toe injury, but was able to play in the following game at Georgia Southern. I'm not sure if he re-aggravated it, or if it was just a precaution, but someone else needed to step up like Henry did in their game against CofC. The scoring boost did come from Nick Paulos who I thought was horrible in the previous games seeing him. I wasn't sure why he was on the floor at times, but he proved me wrong after going three-for-three in the first half on his long distance attempts.

Towards the end of the first half I busted out the camera to take some more pictures to possibly post for the recap. I always do this at the beginning and end of every half, and try to use what I think are the best shots. I don't even pretend to actually know what I'm doing, since I didn't even own a camera before the 800GP started. I would ideally like to get a perfect shot for my amateur skills and of course a dunk would be the coolest, but it's not like you can predict them. I've captured two of them so far, but they were very blurry. I was hoping for another chance, and it came on this night when I had the camera ready for a UNCG offensive possesion. Wofford's Karl Cochran made a breakaway steal and I was ready this time for a great shot.



And of course he missed the dunk; I didn't see how since I was paying more attention on keeping my hands steady, but oh well, maybe next game.

After a first half where Wofford was up 30-28 at the half it was slow going as both teams had some troubles scoring. It eventually took some solid play from Brad Loesing and Kevin Glitner for the Terriers to pull ahead.
Derrell Armstrong tried hard to keep the Spartans in it, but no one else was stepping up this half to help keep UNCG in it. A Glitner trey with under three minutes to go put Wofford up by 10 and pretty much crushed the hopes of any Spartan comeback.

While this was no offensive masterpiece, I'm still glad I went. There are only a handful of games left in the season and I want to see as many as possible. When the season ends, I'm not sure what I'll do to occupy my
time, but I'll just enjoy the rest of the TMM8 while I still can.

WOFFORD 68, at NORTH CAROLINA-GREENSBORO 56
02/21/2012

WOFFORD 18-12 (11-6) -- L. Brown 6-21 5-8 18; K. Giltner 4-8 0-0 10; B. Loesing 6-11 6-6 19; K. Cochran 2-11 5-6 10; L. Skinner 3-5 3-4 9; A. Smith 2-2 4-5 8; D. Crowell 6-6 0-0 12; J. Byrd 0-2 0-0 0; M. Steelman 0-0 0-0 0. Totals 23-45 18-21 68.
NORTH CAROLINA-GREENSBORO 12-17 (10-7) -- K. Van Dussen 4-8 2-2 11; D. Armstrong 7-17 4-4 19; K. Randall 0-6 2-2 2; D. Williams 0-1 0-0 0; T. Hoffer 1-5 0-0 2; A. Brackett 4-5 0-0 8; N. Paulos 3-4 0-0 9; D. Parker 0-1 0-0 0; A. Henry 2-7 1-2 5; E. Bone 0-0 0-0 0. Totals 21-54 9-10 56.

Three-point goals: WOFF 4-11 (K. Giltner 2-2; B. Loesing 1-3; K. Cochran 1-6), UNCG 5-19 (T. Hoffer 0-1; K. Randall 0-2; K. Van Dussen 1-5; D. Parker 0-1; D. Armstrong 1-6; N. Paulos 3-4); Rebounds: WOFF 28 (L. Skinner 8), UNCG 21 (A. Henry 6); Assists: WOFF 14 (B. Loesing 9), UNCG 8 (D. Parker 4); Total Fouls -- WOFF 14, UNCG 18; Fouled Out: WOFF-None; UNCG-D. Williams.